* EMC bought VMWare
* EMC bought Pivotal
* EMC moved all the enterprisey software to Pivotal (including CF & Spring)
* Dell bought EMC
* Dell/EMC spun off Pivotal
I arrived shortly after CF moved to Pivotal, so much of this is lore: VMWare had been working on CF for years; they started a 2.0 rewrite which went out of control (with a huge expensive team of primadonnas); EMC basically pulled the plug and gave the software to Pivotal, who built a new team more-or-less from scratch (the only remnants of the original team were ops people). When I was there we were still doing a lot of "forensic programming" or as they say at Pivotal, building context.
When I say "pretty much everything has been rewritten" I mean it has evolved like that; they didn't sit down to rewrite CloudFoundry (Pivotal does not do rewrites as a cultural axiom). I mean that piecemeal pretty much every bit of code has been altered in significant ways. A lot of the Ruby has been swapped out for Go for performance and maintainability reasons. It was pretty funny to watch a large body of die-hard Rubyists get excited about static types (come to the light!).
As a consultant I was really a fringe player; I'm sure there are people reading this who are/were much more involved and could tell the story better.
The thing I found most interesting is that this project should have failed. A HUGE incredibly complicated body of enterprise software with near-100% team turnover? I would have bet against it ever working. But all that pair programming and rotation and writing stories and backfilling tests etc just eventually ground the problem down. It was expensive as hell and it took years but it looks like a success story now. I don't know of any other big takeover project like this that worked. It's a huge credit to the people working on it, and yes - to the "Pivotal process" that seems to irk so many people in this thread.
Wow didn't realize it was so tangled. Considering all that turnover, it's even more of a miracle! Thanks for the recap.
I agree with the philosophy of "grinding it down". Writing quality software is largely about doing the straightforward thing, and not regressing, for years on end... At a certain size, it's too big for any heroics to make a difference, and you have to rely on plain old "engineering" (tests, prioritization, etc.)
When I say "pretty much everything has been rewritten" I mean it has evolved like that; they didn't sit down to rewrite CloudFoundry (Pivotal does not do rewrites as a cultural axiom). I mean that piecemeal pretty much every bit of code has been altered in significant ways. A lot of the Ruby has been swapped out for Go for performance and maintainability reasons. It was pretty funny to watch a large body of die-hard Rubyists get excited about static types (come to the light!).
As a consultant I was really a fringe player; I'm sure there are people reading this who are/were much more involved and could tell the story better.
The thing I found most interesting is that this project should have failed. A HUGE incredibly complicated body of enterprise software with near-100% team turnover? I would have bet against it ever working. But all that pair programming and rotation and writing stories and backfilling tests etc just eventually ground the problem down. It was expensive as hell and it took years but it looks like a success story now. I don't know of any other big takeover project like this that worked. It's a huge credit to the people working on it, and yes - to the "Pivotal process" that seems to irk so many people in this thread.